After fighting tooth and nail to prevent the so-called Epstein files from being released, last night Trump reversed course and issued a statement reversing course asking his party members in Congress to vote to do so. The House vote to release the files was scheduled for this evening or tomorrow.

Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.

Why the switch? Here’s the conventional wisdom:

Trump spent last week aggressively squeezing allies in the US House, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, to back off in their support of releasing the files. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and when it became apparent the measure was going to pass, Trump backed it in an effort to salvage an embarrassing political loss. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” he posted on his Truth Social network on Sunday evening.

Trump viciously went after GOP congressperson Thomas Massie who had led the move to have the files released. But Massie merely mocked him.

“He got tired of me winning,” Massie said of Trump’s U-turn in an interview Monday morning.
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The campaign to avoid the vote got remarkably ugly in the days before Trump finally conceded, with the president personally attacking Massie for recently remarrying after the sudden death last summer of his wife of more than 30 years. Just hours before Trump’s reversal, one of his top political advisers called him “garbage” in an X post.

That adviser, Chris LaCivita, is carrying out a Trump-ordered effort to unseat Massie from the rural northern Kentucky seat he has held since 2012. Trump recently endorsed a challenger, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, in the GOP primary.

Massie has not flinched from the threats. Politically, he has seen the best fundraising of his congressional career, entering October with more than $2 million in his campaign coffers. As for the personal attacks, Massie said Monday he and his wife were laughing them off.

“She said, ‘I told you we should have invited him to the wedding!’” Massie said.

It is not like Trump to cave like this. His typical style is to fight ferociously all the way, attacking all the people who vote against him, then vetoing the measure, and then if the veto is over-ridden, to file a lawsuit saying that only he has the power to order the release of the files and that the congressional action is an encroachment of presidential powers. That legal fight could drag on for months and end up in the Supreme Court and who knows how they will rule. At the worst, he could order the files be destroyed if they contained some things that are really damaging. That would cause an uproar, similar to when during Watergate, 18 1/2 minutes of the White House tape recordings during a tense conversation got mysteriously erased. That fueled the drive to impeach Richard Nixon and maybe even Trump does not want to risk going that far.

So why give in now? It may be that he has been told that the vote against him will be quite large, with many GOP members voting with the Democrats in both chambers. While that would be embarrassing, it would not be fatal. But perhaps he thinks that once his party members have successfully defied him on one issue, they might be more willing to do so on other issues. This may be a Rubicon that he does not want to force them to cross.

It should be noted that Trump already does have the power to immediately order the release of the files. So if he really felt that he had nothing to hide, he could have done so long ago. So why not order the release now?

As I said in yesterday’s post, there are many things about this that puzzle me. My feeling is that if and when the files are released, the matter will still not be settled. Things like this take on a life of their own.